James David Lewis-Williams said this quote

“ In southern Africa, a great many figures are ithyphallic. This feature has generally – and rather vaguely – been taken to refer to ‘masculinity’, but the painted contexts of the figures seems to confirm that, as in North America, sexual arousal was a metaphor for altered states of consciousness. ”

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The first two-dimensional images were thus not two-dimensional representations of three-dimensional things in the material world, as researchers have always assumed. Rather, they were ‘fixed’ mental images.

~ James David Lewis-Williams

Shamanism is not simply a component of society: on the contrary, shamanism, together with its tiered cosmos, can be said to be the overall framework of society.

~ James David Lewis-Williams

Perhaps the most striking feature of the west European Upper Palaeolithic, one on which many writers comment, is a sharp increase in the rate of change. Compared with the preceding Middle Palaeolithic, a great deal happened in a comparatively short time.

~ James David Lewis-Williams

The notion that an image is a scale model of something else (say, a horse) requires a different set of mental events and conventions from those that perceive the social symbolism of red marks on someone’s chest.

~ James David Lewis-Williams